Land for the people!

Writing in 2012
for War Resisters’ International, Howard Clark sketches the situation facing
nonviolent movements against land grab and militarism. For Clark, campaigns
that combined attachment to land with opposition to war and militarism carried
a special appeal.

Israel’s separation wall. Demotix/Laura Chiesa. All rights reserved.

From the men of property the order came:

They sent the hired men and troopers to wipe out the
Diggers' claim.

"Tear down their cottages. Destroy their
corn!"

They were dispersed but still the vision carries on.

– Lines from Leon
Rosselson's song celebrating the Diggers and their struggle for land in 17th
century England

Throughout
history, militarism has been associated with the unjust appropriation of land
and displacement of the local population. And this is still going on today
whether we are referring to military facilities – huge bases now under
construction, a variety of testing or training facilities – or to the military
enforcers (state or private) of the globalized phenomenon known as ‘land-grab’
in the name of monocultivation, biofuels or resource extraction.

Land is often seen
as the foundation of life, and land movements can somehow evoke something deep
in us. Perhaps this connection has been recognised more by fascists and
nationalists than by urban leftists, but it is also a utopian impulse in
anarchist and nonviolent traditions from the Diggers' "common treasury for
all", through Kropotkin and Gandhi, to the slogan “Tierra y Libertad /
Land and Freedom!” Indeed, in every continent, among tribal peoples and
peasants, we find a different relationship to the land – and indeed to the
earth – than the attitudes of domination, exploitation and extraction that
underlie so much destruction.

For me, campaigns
that combine attachment to land with opposition to war and militarism have
always carried a special appeal. I think now of some of the campaigns mentioned
in this Broken Rifle, and particularly of the current campaign in Jeju island,
South Korea, in which some friends of WRI have been arrested. One of the most
inspiring struggles in Europe in the 1970s was the Larzac campaign in France in
the 1970s to stop the expansion of a firing range. A campaign that saw farmers
taking their sheep to demonstrate with the Eiffel Tower as their backdrop. A
campaign that used a wide repertoire of tactics, including war tax resistance
and the creation of a land trust in which thousands of people bought their tiny
square of the Larzac plateau. A constructive campaign in which people showed
alternative uses for the Larzac, setting up a nonviolence training centre,
experimenting with renewable energy, and promoting other small cooperative
economic projects.

I think too of
campaigns in concert with indigenous peoples, especially against nuclear
testing or other parts of the nuclear chain, such as uranium mining. This is
real protection of heritage – at the local level and at the global level in
opposing the nuclear threat.

Historically, war
resisters themselves have often looked to forming communities on the land where
they can live according to their own values. Today's communities for the peace
movement in Colombia have gone much further. Some are declarations by tribes or
municipalities of their rejection of arms – be they of the state, the paramilitaries
or the guerrilla – but others are communities of several hundred previously
displaced people, determined to live in peace, organising themselves in a
participatory way, and practising ecological agriculture without conceding to
monocultivation. When the former Uribe government insisted on placing a police
station, violating the principles of the first Peace Community, San José de
Apartadó, members of the community dismantled their homes and collective
facilities and rebuilt them away elsewhere.

I am writing
shortly after this year's Palestinian day of the land, where Israeli troops
killed one protester and injured more than 120 others. Since 1976 this has been
a day of protest against the continuing confiscation of Palestinian lands, a
central issue in the oppression of Palestinians. It is worth noting that
campaigns for the land have not only seen some of the most powerful Palestinian
nonviolent actions, but also actions in which Israelis are more likely to take
part. Some of the many local struggles against the Separation Wall – a
monstrous barrier which confiscates yet more Palestinian land, isolates
Palestinian communities one from another and cuts them off from essential
resources – can be seen as land struggles. Also some of the most constructive
actions that have taken place since the 1960s – such as when groups, often a
combination of Palestinians and Israelis, have attempted to reclaim the land
and its fruits by planting olive trees or trying to harvest olives.

Finally, land
remains central to the global social conflict which fuels so many local or
national conflicts. Although urban dwellers globally now outnumber rural dwellers
for the first time, 75 percent of the world's poor still live in rural areas.
Their access to land is fundamental, especially for the millions of women
subsistence farmers. In an age of globalised land-grab, venerable concepts such
as ‘the commons’ take on a new relevance for those whose livelihoods are under
threat and who face displacement. But more than this, as the groups connected
with Via Campesina and other rural networks have emphasised, the issue is not
just food security – but food sovereignty: "the right to healthy and
culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable
methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture
systems". Against the interests of corporate profit, of supporting
non-viable levels of consumption and greed, of seeing land in terms of industrial
modes of exploitation and extraction, War Resisters' International stands with
those who nonviolently resist and who strive to demonstrate what the world
needs.

This earth divided we shall make whole

So it will be a common treasury for all.

About the author

Howard Clark was a civil resistance
scholar, peace activist and chair of War Resisters’ International. His most
recent book is People Power: Unarmed
Resistance and Global Solidarity (London: Pluto 2009)

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